xydac

Ten years ago I landed in Boston from India in the middle of winter, knowing almost no one.

Watching tokens stream onto the screen feels like magic the same way a dial-up handshake once did.

Part 3 of my Home Assistant journey: a stubborn BanlanX LED controller that only spoke a phone-app dialect, a Mac that already had the Bluetooth radio I needed, and 150 lines of Python that taught Home Assistant to talk to it over MQTT.

I started with a question about how LLMs develop their personalities and ended up four months later in cell biology, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience.

A speculative letter from 2040.

I run several side projects and my data lives in six different places.

How I manage Home Assistant entirely through Claude Code: SSH access, two CLI tools wrapping the REST and WebSocket APIs, and a CLAUDE.md that teaches it my specific setup.

A $21 ESP32 touchscreen, ESPHome's LVGL that refused to calibrate, and openHASP as the rescue.

Getting started with Mistral 7B via llama.cpp on Apple Silicon: cloning the repo, downloading a quantized model, running the local server, and understanding the generation parameters.